Dizona receives APA award for assessment research

Paul Dizona

Paul Dizona, CYFS graduate assistant, has received the Psychological Assessment Young Scholars Award from the American Psychological Association.

The award recognizes his research poster, titled “Pre-K Measurement Triangulation Using Caregiver and Directly Assessed Measures of Cognitive Ability,” which Dizona will present at the 2017 APA Convention Aug. 2-6.

Dizona’s research uses a sample of 2,400 Mongolian preschool children and their teachers who are part of a larger study examining an international measure of school readiness. Researchers measured children on approximately 100 tasks, while asking children’s teachers corresponding questions.

“There’s truth in both perspectives,” said Dizona, a fourth-year graduate student in quantitative, qualitative and psychometric methods. “A child might get nervous counting to 10 and not perform as usual, but a teacher might say ‘Yes, she can do that.'”

Using the survey data from children and their classroom teachers, Dizona applied structural equation modeling to combine the two datasets into a single score.

“This project was all about trying to boil down school readiness into something you can use,” Dizona said.